America’s demand for electric power is surging and, with it, the need to move electrons around the country. Nowhere is that trend more tangible than at GE Vernova’s Grid Solutions factory in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a sprawling 332,000-square-foot facility that has been making high-voltage instrument transformers and high-voltage circuit breakers, key components of the electric grid for more than three decades.
These aren’t the breakers you find in the electrical panel in your home. Charleroi’s monsters can handle up to half a million volts and 5,000 amperes of current and require flatbed trucks to move. They’re also engineered to the unique specifications of each customer, such as public utilities or data centers. That creates a dilemma for Altay Keresteci, plant manager of the Charleroi site: how to respond quickly to increased demand for precision products that are assembled largely by human hands and require extensive customization and testing before they can ship.
“The demand has really soared in the last one and a half years,” remarks Keresteci, noting that Charleroi’s operations had already been growing quickly, with staff roughly doubling in the past five years. Charleroi’s breakers, instrument transformers, and other high-voltage equipment, some of it 30 feet tall, are flying off the proverbial shelves. “Artificial intelligence, data centers, renewable energy sources — all of it requires a new grid, and in order to have that you need our products.”
This is a major reason GE Vernova announced in January that it will invest $600 million in American factories and facilities in the next two years, which, among other upgrades, is expected to add some 260 new jobs at the Grid Solutions sites at Charleroi and Clearwater, Florida. But adding new capacity at a plant like Charleroi can take years and cost millions of dollars, so Keresteci and his team turned to a business philosophy called lean management that focuses on continuous improvement to boost productivity and improve plant safety. These efforts culminated in February, when the plant held a kaizen week, a series of workshops that bring together people from various disciplines to brainstorm and implement improvements to industrial processes. The event’s most ambitious goal was to speed up production of the largest circuit breaker the factory makes, and Keresteci wants to quintuple production by the end of the year.
“Lean is the only reliable tool I have, because you can’t just expand the facility that fast,” says Keresteci. “You can’t add equipment to a limited state space that fast, but you can utilize what you have by continuous improvement.”
By the end of the week, Charleroi’s teams had shaved two-thirds off the time it takes to build the mammoth circuit breaker, but it was the process as much as the results that matter for the future.
Tools That Meet the Moment
The kaizen week at Charleroi is just one example of how lean principles have spread across GE Vernova’s operations. In fact, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik and other company leaders participated in the Charleroi event themselves, helping various plant teams see their challenges from a new perspective.
“When I think about everything happening around the globe with our events and think about what's happening in this business, at this location, what an incredible story,” Strazik said, explaining that on some products the growth in manufacturing quantities equates to a massive 700% increase. This is being done, he says, “without a lot of capital expenditures at this site. It’s really about the lean muscle that we’re building as a team.”
Driving Keresteci’s ambitious expansion goals is a shift in America’s demand for power. Before the COVID pandemic, electricity usage in the U.S. had been growing slowly, with power-sipping LED lightbulbs and efficient appliances offsetting population growth. Then came AI, and with it a growing need for massive data centers that utilize a lot of electricity. A push for more domestic semiconductor manufacturing and the growing popularity of electric vehicles are also driving demand. As a result, U.S. electricity usage is now forecast to grow by 16% in the next five years after growing less than 1% a year for two decades. That represents a heap of new power generation and a dizzying number of new connections to the grid.
Charleroi’s heavyweight breaker, the DT2-550, can handle the load. Designed to withstand earthquakes, extreme temperatures, and corrosive air pollution, this “dead-tank” breaker handles 550,000 volts, keeps electrical circuits from overloading, and prevents shorts from frying other equipment. As befits a crucial piece of safety equipment, Charleroi’s engineers and technicians perform extensive testing on each unit before it’s allowed out of the factory gates, creating a bottleneck, while the need to share space and equipment with other products creates its own delays.
As the kaizen week got underway, staff created a so-called spaghetti chart tracking the footpath of the workers who assemble the DT2-550. The chart revealed that assemblers walked more than a kilometer — or nine football fields — each shift. Other efficiency challenges emerged from the highly structured kaizen process, which encourages information sharing and ideas for improvement that can be measured quantitatively. For example, workers building the DT2-550 had to wait an average of 30 minutes to use an overhead crane that is shared with other lines at the plant and were spending 44 minutes removing bolts installed on each unit earlier in the assembly process in order to attach a set of brackets.
The assembly team added a fixture to a lift table that allows workers to insert the central conductor into the breaker’s enormous bushings (the ridged, cone-like insulators) without the crane. To solve the bolt removal issue, the team decided that the brackets would be installed earlier in the process.
The Idea of Order at Charleroi
The team also found opportunities for improvement in how materials and supplies were being fed to workers. For example, one set of components called current transformers was arriving from a supplier stacked out of order, forcing workers to unpack and repack it frequently. Similarly, organizing another component, support slings, by length, instead of tossing them all in a big bin, saved a surprising amount of time each shift — anyone who’s reorganized a chaotic closet in their home can relate. Safety and ergonomics are also an important kaizen focus at GE Vernova. Using a computer vision–based system that analyzes how employees perform physical tasks to highlight ergonomic issues, the team moved a tool kit that employees had to bend over to retrieve and perched it higher up and closer to the workstation being utilized.
Such seemingly minor, incremental improvements are a hallmark of lean principles, and they can really add up. In the end, the team shaved approximately 67% off the time to assemble a DT2-550, cut the distance workers had to walk during a shift by about 37%, and came up with 15 implementable safety improvements, all in a single workweek. But lean does means continuous, so Keresteci has a total of 60 kaizen events planned for Charleroi in 2025.
“We’re taking a risk, committing to additional production capacity, and with each kaizen event we are getting closer to this commitment,” says Keresteci. “I am proud of the team and what we have achieved during this short but high-intensity week. This event was the right step. It showed that our journey is progressing.”
About GE Vernova
GE Vernova (NYSE: GEV) is purpose-built global energy company that includes Power, Wind, and Electrification segments and is supported by its accelerator businesses. Building on over 130 years of experience tackling the world’s challenges, GE Vernova is uniquely positioned to help lead the energy transition by continuing to electrify the world while simultaneously working to decarbonize it. GE Vernova helps customers power economies and deliver electricity that is vital to health, safety, security, and improved quality of life. GE Vernova is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., with approximately 75,000 employees across 100+ countries around the world. Supported by the Company’s purpose, The Energy to Change the World, GE Vernova technology helps deliver a more affordable, reliable, sustainable, and secure energy future.
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